There's one more event to add to this record-breakinghurricane season: a hurricane has hit Ireland, leading to the first-ever severe weather alert for the entire country. Extra-tropical Storm Ophelia made landfall over the weekend. So far two men and a woman have been killed. The Irish National Meteorological Service, Met Éireann, previously warned that the storm would be "a danger to life and property."

The storm, downgraded from a hurricane overnight, was the worst to hit Ireland in half a century. It made landfall with winds as strong as 190km/h hitting the most southerly tip of the country.

As hurricane-force gusts battered the Republic, one woman and a man died in separate incidents when trees fell on their cars.

A second man died in a chainsaw accident while attempting to remove a tree felled by the storm. People in Ireland are being told to stay indoors.

Sean Hoskins, from Wairarapa in NZ, and who is now a forestry contractor in County Kilkenny, said there were some pretty epic winds.

"We lost our power. I didn't go to work today, it's too windy to cut trees. The same with my subcontractors, we all stayed home. A lot of damage and I know I have to go in tomorrow in an estate we're working in at the moment and clear a couple of roads into the place and we've got a few acres of Douglas fir that have come down. The difference between Ireland and the Wairarapa is that in the Wairarapa you have seven-wire fences along every boundary but here it's all hedgerows and all the hedgerows have big old lovely trees in them. It only takes a few of those to come down and you can sort of knock out power lines and block roads."

He said power was out in patches all over the country. Across Ireland, thousands of homes and businesses are without electricity and all schools have been shut. About 360,000 homes and businesses in the Irish Republic, and 16,000 in Northern Ireland, are now without power. About 4,000 customers in Wales have also lost power.

A yellow warning of "very windy weather" also covered parts of Scotland, the west and north of England as well as Wales. Ireland's Electricity Supply Board described it as an unprecedented event that would affect every part of the country for days. Around 170 flights from Ireland's two main airports at Dublin and Shannon were cancelled.

In England, three flood warnings - meaning flooding is expected - have been issued in the southwest, and there are several flood alerts across other parts of the country.

The Scottish EnvironmentProtection Agency has also put out a series of flood alerts and warnings in place for the southwest.